Hello.

I am a refugee of sorts from the other place, in that I was a member-lurker for a long time and only recently began commenting much. I was just about to start doing diaries when His Royal Highness issued his grand edict and, while I do go there every few days—mostly after a Bernie win—to see what’s going on, I go there less and less and will probably cancel my membership at some point. I had also just about convinced my brother, who has been starved for progressive political conversation, to sign up there and start getting involved, but since the grand edict he has also decided not to join. I am working on him to join up here instead. So instead of creating my first diary in the other place, I am doing it here. And I wanted to share something positive that I have been enjoying for a while now.

A few weeks or so ago I found a Youtube upload of an old vinyl that I used to love listening to as a child, and I promptly downloaded it, converted it to mp3, and burned discs for all my nieces. (If they made a CD of that and sold it, I would buy the hell out of it, but since they aren’t this is my only option.) I also loaded it onto my tablet, thinking it might be fun to listen to it at work and take a pleasant trip down memory lane to brighten up the daily grind. I wasn’t expecting much more than that, but I got it anyway.

Right off the bat, I was blown away by the enormous amount of effort put into this children’s record. It could be a Broadway show, albeit one for children, and far better than anything being put out for children these days. That is not just nostalgia talking. I have plenty of nostalgic likes that I can easily acknowledge were objectively trash. I listened to this record several times in a row. In fact, I listened to it over and over until it was lunchtime, which amounts to a five hour work period, and I still genuinely enjoy listening to it now and then.

But the part I really wanted to share with my fellow Bernie supporters is the story the record tells. As I listened to this thing over and over, I started to realize that the main jist of this story sounds strangely familiar. Just listen and tell me if you can see what I mean.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG7b-WKYeQ8]

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM-NFyn29_Y]

Mp3 (courtesy of ngant17): http://tinyurl.com/carnation-hall

SPOILERS

Do you see it? If not, let me outline it here:

Part 1 starts with a garden that features Rose Petal, who is very nice and well-liked and admired for having a beautiful voice that helps the garden grow, and Nastina the spider, who is not well-liked and wants to be the star of the garden. Rose Petal’s friends encourage her to give a concert, which Nastina wants to participate in, and Rose Petal says she can despite her friends’ consternation, because she believes everyone should be given a chance to shine, and no one should be systematically left out.

“Everyone you know has something good to show
And every living thing has a little bit of joy to bring
To every day in every way
It’s a beautiful life we live
And everyone has a little bit of love to give”

In Part 2, we see Rose Petal and her accompanist working together to practice for the concert the next day, while Nastina is slave-driving her fly henchman to support her efforts to practice, threatening him with doom if he fails to meet her demands. But when Nastina realizes that Rose Petal will be the star of the show no matter what she does, she sends her henchman to sabotage the accompanist’s piano.

At the concert the next day, Nastina gives an obnoxious performance about how flowers are ugly, how fantastic she herself is and how much everyone needs to see that. She never gets to finish her song, because her maniacal performance and increasing desperation as the audience fails to respond the way she wants them to causes her organ to explode. When Rose Petal gets up to sing, her accompanist finds his piano ruined and Rose Petal must sing alone. She encourages other creatures, such as the crickets, songbirds, and the flute-playing elm tree, to help her, and by the end the whole garden has joined in to help Rose Petal sing a song about persevering in the face of adversity. Then the whole garden applauds for Rose Petal and for themselves, for working together to save the concert and making beautiful music as a community effort. Nastina storms off home with her henchman schlepping behind her, telling her she’s actually a genius ahead of her time and they just weren’t able to see it. (This despite his jokes earlier about how bad a performer she is.) The accompanist has since cleaned up his piano, and Rose Petal then sings a final song about how people with love in their heart will always prevail.

“If you have love in your heart
The birds will all sing for you
The flowers will grow.
There’s no better place in the world you can start
If you have love in your heart”

Do you see it now?

-Rose Petal’s songs are always about the value of other people or the value of working together or believing in yourself. Nastina’s songs are invariably about herself, how great she is, and the insistence that everyone else acknowledge this as a fact. The only time Nastina mentions someone other than herself is when she insults the very audience she wants to like her.

-Rose Petal is driven by a joy of music and a desire to cooperate with and even help others, while Nastina is driven by the desire to win at all costs.

-Nastina, unable to beat Rose Petal fairly, resorts to sabotaging Rose Petal’s performance. This backfires as the whole garden joins in to help Rose Petal sing her song, and even the birds and crickets enthusiastically join in to help her.

-More on that note, Rose Petal is stripped of the traditional musical support, but a community effort successfully replaces that traditional support, and wins the day.

-Nastina’s only supporter, her fly henchman, is insulting her in both her intro song and her rehearsing song but he talks her up to get her into the concert, and when she gets out there in front of people he seems dedicated to promoting her and unhappy that the audience is not responding well to her. In the rehearsal song he claims she has “eight arms and legs and still can’t play”, but at the concert he supports her completely, seems distressed as she increasingly falls apart, and as they leave defeated he tells her she’s a great performer no matter what anyone else says. He’s only willing to criticize her when there’s no contest going on, he spins her loss as a win, and it almost seems at times that he only supports her because he is afraid of what might happen if he doesn’t, or if she doesn’t win. It seems that on some deep-down level, he realizes Nastina is not really very great at all.

I think that pretty much sums it up. Give it a listen, you might like it, especially if you’re down. And it’s a pretty good underlying progressive message for kids of all genders, IMO. My brother used to listen to it with us, and he liked it too and remembers it fondly.

Cheers!

EDIT TO ADD: I thought of one more point, though it delves into the cartoon, an outside source. The setting in both the record and cartoon is a garden outside an abandoned house that used to be happy and beautiful but is now ruined and desolate, and Rose Petal's voice is what is breathing life into the surroundings. But in the cartoon, Nastina gives an impassioned speech on how foolish it is for Rose Petal and the flowers to try and bring new life into this wasteland, because death and decay are just the way things are, fighting it is futile, and everyone should just be realistic and accept the surrounding death rather than do anything to change it.

Damned if I can think of who these characters remind me of!